Bonds over Fruits Basket

So I spent the last few days watching Tsubasa: ReservoirChronicles and xxxholic. Then started reading the manga, a little backwards I know, but I was sick and his seemed to make more sense at the time. But that's neither here nor there. While watching these two I suddenly had an overwhelming desire to watch Fruits Basket. So last night I pulled it out and set up my laptop to play it. As soon as I heard the opening song, I instantly smiled, but it wasn't actually the anime that made me smile. While it played, I thought of my friend Cat and just how much I miss her, and why Fruits Basket is so special to us.

Here's the thing you have to understand about Cat and me, we've been friends for quite a while and we use to be neighbors. But even though we were neighbors for a while, it was actually a few years before her and I became friends. See, her brother and my sister were in the same grade and hung out quite a bit, but it wasn't until her mom came over to talk to my mom about something that we (Cat and I) finally met. She came into get her mom because they needed to go somewhere, and I distracted her with my Fushigi Yuugi manga. Haha! Then the two of us talked about other anime and soon started hanging about and realized there were more things that we were both interested in – namely  Johnny Depp, after all this was right after the first Pirates of the Caribbean had come out and we’re both completely obsessed with him.  

But getting back to what I was saying, Cat and I have a very interesting friendship. Now Fruits Basket was by no means the first anime we watched together, but it was definitely a very important one in our friendship. We initially started watching it at an anime club at the university here, and we both just fell in love with it. I think part of it was because it was the first anime we watched together that we both weren't fighting/drooling over the same character, as is what happened with Bastard’s Dark Schneider, she loves Kyo and I absolutely adore Yuki. But I think it goes a little deeper than that, at least for me. Now in my circle of friends I always felt like the outsider, like I was just there to fill make a circle but never really part of the group. And so the part in Fruits Basket when Tohru is remembering a game the children use to play, a game called Fruits Basket, where she was labeled the rice ball and no one called her to come play, that was how I felt. With Cat it was like, I had always been the ‘rice ball’ and someone had finally called for me to come play as well.

Now I’m not saying my other friends are any less important and I hope none of them take offense, and I love them all, Cat is just like another half of me. And I know that even though she’s thousands of miles away right now, when I see her this summer, I know we’ll pick up exactly where we left off like she’d been here all the time.

Fruits Basket just symbolizes our friendship for me and makes me so happy to finally have friends where I feel I belong.

The two of us even did something a little strange. We had both decided we wanted to buy the anime, but as both of us were struggling at the time, her a poor college student and me getting my first apartment, we decided to just buy one copy and shared it between the two of us. She kept two volumes and I kept two, she got volumes 1 and 3, which worked out since 3 had Kyo on the front, and I got 2 and 4 which also worked since the cover of volume 2 had Yuki on it. It couldn't have been more perfect. Since we generally didn't want to separate the series and we always watched it together, we took turns holding on to the whole series. Then after a while, we finished both of our series by buying a box set and splitting it between the two of us, with each of us now taking turns keeping the box.

 

So all and all, Fruits Basket, it just made me really happy to watch it and reminisce about my friend Cat. Maybe I’ll prepare a fruits basket with some rice balls for when she come home. If you don’t get it, check out Fruits Baskets to get the reference.

Until next time.